Building communityThere's many different ways of doing it. The most obvious for audiophiles is letting others hear your system and favorite music or sampling sound and unfamiliar music outside of your own home. How about Internet magazines such as ours and many others? At present, we 'broadcast' across international boundaries straight into people's homes. That's similar to high-power radio towers of yore which helped undermine the relative information isolation of former Iron Curtain nations. Alas, there's the language barrier. While English has arguably become the global tongue, there's many who don't speak it at all or not comfortably enough to feel like reading in English for fun. Our reach is still selective and discriminatory.

Accordingly, we now offer syndication/franchising opportunities to spawn 6moons satellites. The idea is very simple, really. It involves translating select and original 6moons content into other languages. Depending on the satellite site's owner/operator, it could thereafter expand to generate its own domestic staff of writers to publish original content. Select samples of that content would then be syndicated back to the mother site, including software reviews on music indigenous to that country.

Start-up requirements for such sister sites are minimal - high-speed Internet access, a URL and translation skills. Training in Adobe GoLive's HTML program and Photoshop to perform site creation and maintenance will be provided by me personally here in Arroyo Seco. Ditto for hammering out the pertinent details appropriate for the market. Interested parties should contact me to learn more and plan on a one-week visit to New Mexico to consummate a deal.

Building bridgesHow to satisfy calling and cash, creativity and commerce - simultaneously? Running an audio site like ours is great fun and an enormous amount of work. For the right person, it's a nearly ideal solution to connect the pennies with the passion to not get rich but support oneself doing what one loves to do. Seeing we've already done a lot of the critical foundation work by establishing the concept and a significant amount of quality content, the owner/operator of a sister site can be up and running practically overnight once the desired amount of archival content has been translated as a start-up site cache. Thereafter, a select amount of current postings will be translated in parallel to provide constantly fresh updates. This can be done part-time or on weekends to occur in parallel with a real-world job. Don't want to leave that security? Maintain your site as a pure syndication enterprise of a single owner/operator. Have ambitions to turn self-employed? Enjoy a gradual non-pressure ramp-up until your operation becomes self-sustaining to allow transition into full-time publishing by assembling and managing your own small staff of contributors - an independent 6moons Russia, China or Brazil. We've had help getting to where we are. Now it's time for us to help others who wish to do a similar thing.

Needless to say, interested parties need to be comfortable with our concept since successful 'franchising' means that philosophy, approach, appearance and execution must be maintained to the same standards of the mother site. Then again, interest in this idea goes hand in hand with liking what we do in the first place. Building community. This idea of expanding beyond the "English pool" is one additional avenue 6moons can pursue to build bridges and connect more music lovers and latent 'philes across the globe to the hobby and each other. Think you've got the creative and management skills as well as passion to do it? Contact me and we'll pursue this line of inquiry together: srajan@6moons.com.